Basketball, frisbees and cookouts are common to North Campus, but Saturday the area staged a springtime activity rare to the Quads: a street performance.

Three Northwestern students jammed Saturday for about an hour and a half on the new basketball courts east of Bobb-McCulloch Hall. With two guitars, a keyboard and a laptop computer, the trio, dubbed Super Sportif, entertained a steady crowd of about 30 students with an improvised performance drawing from several decades of popular music.

Several of the those huddled around the group on the overcast evening were friends and neighbors of the band, but some simply stopped by to listen to the music. Two students crawled out on Bobb-McCulloch’s roof outside their room to hear the tunes better.

McCormick sophomore Joe Zadeh, who plays keyboard for the group, said playing on the courts was a rebellion.

“We kind of like to create our own venues,” he said.

Bobb-McCulloch Area Coordinator Dan Barnett stopped by, but let the band play on.

Zadeh and band members Graham Ruby, a Weinberg senior, and Neil King, a McCormick freshman, joked that the basketball court was the second stop on Sportif’s 2001 campus tour.

“But by campus tour, we mean places on this campus,” chimed in Weinberg junior Steven Rozenski, who joined the performance to read poems by A.E. Housman and Rainer Maria Wilke.

A computer hooked up to the band’s amplifiers provided the beat. McCormick senior Ed Sawma joined in on trumpet for a song.

Sportif played familiar riffs ranging from the guitar stylings of Santana to the full-throttle hair-band rock of the theme from “Top Gun,” as commuter jets passed overhead.

Zadeh and Ruby threw a couple of crowd pleasers into the act. The two played back and forth on keyboard and guitar to “Dueling Banjos,” drawing the crowd into a country-style hoedown. Later the two put their stylings head-to-head, with Zadeh playing the keyboard with his forehead and Ruby the guitar with his teeth.

Sportif hopes the show continues into at least the near future. Band members mentioned Allison Hall and the Unicorn Caf